EDI challenge

[Former Member]

Hello ABAP Gurus,

Implementing EDI is in itself a very big task. I guess the biggest challenge in implementing EDI is testing.

How do you test with someone you may never meet? How do you do your own testing without sending data to your partner? How do you differentiate between a test message and a real one?

Can somepne please foucs some light on my above asked questions ?

Answesr will be surely awarded

Regards,

Tushar.

[Former Member]

Tushar,

Whenever we talk about EDI, usually there is a sub system in your landscape that you deal with. Guess you also have one in your system. Once sub system transforms the data into the target format, it will search for recievers of that specific message.

If you want to do unit testing, do NOT confiure receivers in your EDI sub system and let it error out. Then look at the message for the correctness of the data. Once that is through you need to transmit the data to the TEST system of your partner. So, you need to have contact point. You configure their test system as the receiver and send data. That is how you can do the integration testing.

Hope this helps you.

Regards,

Ravi

Note : Please reward points if these answers help you.

[Rashid_Javed]

Well during initial stages of your ALE setup, WE19 is a good tool. You can use it to quickly create temporary idocs and process these for inbound processing. You can even use ABAP debugging to run through the inbound process function module.

For outbound processing, initially you should use the file port in your partner profile for outbound idocs and direct the file port to some temp directory on your app server. This way you can have the idoc in file, which you can easily read again to validate the output and fields in idoc.

Also if you doing an SAP/SAP integration, Idoc and SAP versions are very important. This fact is sometimes overlooked and end result is mysterious system behaviour. Places to look for these are (1) while defining ports, transaction code WE21(you will see radio buttons for different SAP versions) and in you partner profile transaction code WE20 look for field called “Seg. release in IDoc Type” so make sure that you are persistently sending correct versions of Idocs for a smooth system behaviour.

You mentioned a very interesting point that how do you test with someone you never meet, being involved in some situations similar to these all I can suggest is use email frequently. In the initial setup phase it is very important to build trust with your EDI partner because initially both parties are very sensitive about errors ( you will hear things like “it is OK from our side, there is a mistake in your system” etc) So it is important that you present yourself as someone who is helpful and sincere. Always try to work and suggest possible solutions even if the problem is not directly related to your system. From a more technical side, clarify in the initial stage of project about the technical terms used. For example May be what they are calling plant in there system is actually a company code or warehouse number in your SAP system so make extra effort during the mapping phase.

I hope this will be helpful to you although I couldn’t put it in a more organized way

Cheers

[Former Member]

Hi

Check OSS 47071 . This gives an info on how to go along with and EDI project.

Cheers